Dubbed "The Black Widow" for preying on her family and leaving a dead husband, boyfriend and son in her trail, Judy Buenoano was executed on Florida's temperamental Old Sparky on March 30, 1998.
Asked if she had a final statement, she answered weakly, "No, sir," squeezing her eyes shut and keeping them shut, not looking at the witnesses on the other side of the glass. In her final days Judy said she wanted to be remembered as a good mother. "Seeing the face of Jesus, that's what I think about," she recently told a TV station. "I'm ready to go home."
In June 1971, Buenoano's husband, James Goodyear, returned to Orlando from a tour of duty in South Vietnam and started feeling ill. Goodyear died in September. Buenoano went to live with Bobby Joe Morris, who also grew ill and died. Then John Gentry, who started getting ill and checked into a hospital. Gentry had vitamins that Buenoano was giving him analyzed and found poison.
Buenoano was convicted of drowning her 19-year-old son, Michael Goodyear, in 1980 by pushing him out of a canoe into a river. He was paralyzed from arsenic poisoning and was wearing heavy leg and arm braces.
Buenoano was not a suspect in the death of her husband, James Goodyear, or her son's drowning until she tried to kill her fiance, John Gentry, and collect on a $500,000 insurance policy by blowing up his car in 1983. After the attempt on Gentry's life, she changed her name from "Goodyear" to the"Buenoano" (good year in Spanish). When police made the Goodyear-Buenoano connection the kid's body was exhumed and it was found to be plump with arsenic.
Prosecutors in Colorado also found evidence Ms. Buenoano poisoned a boyfriend in 1978 but did not charge her because she had already gotten the death penalty in Florida. Judy mantained her innocence until the very end.